The other day my Nokia M1122 4-port ADSL modem caught fire. Take my word for it: It’s not an entertaining experience. This is the modem that came with my PLDTDSL subscription, and was one of the last of its kind since Nokia stopped manufacturing these modems. Anyway, PLDT replaced it with one of their newer DSL models, a red SE260 ADSL2+ modem which unfortunately only had one WAN port.

I saw this as an opportunity to learn networking, since even with a 4-port modem I didn’t take full advantage of it; I guess that happens when you don’t know the admin console password of the device. I decided to invest in a CD-R King IP04170 wired router for this purpose; this cost me only P580.00 in the nearest CD-R King branch to me.

With the router I was able to network my two machines and share an internet connection. It was because of the shared internet connection that I looked into the speed cap of my plan. I found out that this same plan was now being offered with a speed cap 1 Mbps higher than what I subscribed to many years ago. Long-story-short: I was able to get my bandwidth speed increased.

Because of the speed cap increase, I had to be migrated from the Legacy DSL platform of PLDT to one of their newer generation platforms, which as far as I know is now on IP DSLAM. This migration meant that I would need to change my router setting again from supplying a user name and password to connect to the modem, to one that didn’t need it.

With that background in hand, in this post I’ll talk about how to configure your PLDT DSL connection using a CD-R King IP04170 wired router for both Legacy and non-Legacy platform accounts.

DISCLAIMER: This is just my attempt to get the routing setup to work for my case, which fortunately did actually work for me. Be advised that, depending on what you have, the steps I took could still turn out very differently for you, or not work at all, or make things worse, etc. Please check your machine’s / router’s manual or consult a friend who would know better. I’m still in the process of learning how to do this, and there’s many more that I haven’t been able to explore or learn, so this just represents what I’ve learned so far from my experiments.

NOTE: In my initial attempts, I tried accessing the PLDT DSL modem’s admin console, because all the posts I’ve seen so far always mention the need to tinker with its configuration. As far as my experience is concerned, I eventually saw that this was not necessary. Leave the DSL modem as it is; the only thing you will need to configure is the router.

Legacy platform setup

Your PLDT DSL account is in the Legacy platform if you’re using the PPPoE protocol. In other words, you need to supply a user name and password, in the format <area code><telephone number>@pldt and <9-digit account number>, respectively, to get an internet connection from the modem.

I didn’t follow the instructions of the CD-R King router manual to the letter, which was fine since I was still able to setup my home network right.

Connect your machines to the available LAN ports in the CD-R King router.

When prompted, enter the user name and password which is both admin (in small caps). At this point you may choose to use the Setup Wizard or do things manually; for the succeeding steps I will discuss the manual approach, skipping a few steps that are not necessary.

Click on the Operation Mode page and choose the Gateway option. Click Apply, and wait for the router to finish rebooting.

Expand the TCP/IP section and click on WAN Interface.

For the WAN Access Type choose PPPoE and supply your user name (note the format) and password.

Select other options you would like to enable, then click Apply Changes.

At this point, you can test if you’re successful by turning on the DSL modem and turning off, then turning on the router. Give it one or two minutes to establish a connection, which you will see once your LAN icon shows that it’s connected.

Non-Legacy platform setup

PLDT had a number of platforms after the Legacy platform, which unfortunately I wasn’t able to take note of when the customer service representative I was speaking to listed them out. As far as I know, I’m on the latest platform that they have, and as far as I know it’s IP DSLAM. Anyway, that’s not important. What’s important to note is that once you’re not on the Legacy platform, you will not need to supply a user name and password; new subscribers to PLDT’s DSL have this setup. The router needs to be configured as appropriate.

On a side-note, I asked for advice from CD-R King’s router support team. Long-story-short: I discovered they gave me conflicting advice, so I ended up still doing trial-and-error to get my connections to work, something I was hoping to avoid by calling them in the first place. Example: Setting the Operation Mode to Bridge will not let you configure DHCP, which I was advised was also needed to be configured. What I list down here are the steps I took to get my connections operational; again, be advised that it could still turn out very differently for you.

Connect your machines to the available LAN ports in the CD-R King router.

When prompted, enter the user name and password which is both admin (in small caps). At this point you may choose to use the Setup Wizard or do things manually; for the succeeding steps I will discuss the manual approach, skipping a few steps that are not necessary.

Click on the Operation Mode page and choose the Gateway option. Click Apply, and wait for the router to finish rebooting.

Expand the TCP/IP section and click on WAN Interface.

For the WAN Access Type choose DHCP.

Check the Clone MAC Address option and click on Scan Mac Address. NOTE: All the machines you connected to the router should be turned on for the router to scan the MAC addresses of your network cards. I previously tried not doing this, and it took a while before I got a stable IP address. Somehow, having the router clone one of your machines’ MAC addresses helps in establishing an IP address faster; I could be wrong and this step may not be necessary, anyway you can try it out to see if this also works for you.

Select other options you would like to enable, then click Apply Changes.

At this point, you can test if you’re successful by turning on the DSL modem and turning off, then turning on the router. Give it one or two minutes to establish a connection, which you will see once your LAN icon shows that it’s connected. Alternatively, you can go to the TCP/IP section, WAN Status subsection and check if you’re already connected.

Optional settings

To speed up establishing a connection between my machines, I went to the TCP/IP section, LAN Interface subsection and setup static IPs for the machines in my network. That way it will reduce the time it will take for my machines to query for an IP and for the router to respond with one.

Your bandwidth speed will decrease if you use all your computers at the same time to access the internet; this is to be expected because the connection is shared across all active machines. If you want your speed to increase in one machine, then the quick and dirty (read: crude) approach is to disconnect other machines. The more intelligent alternative is to setup Quality of Service (QoS) rule settings for each IP address leased out to each machine (hence it would be nice if each machine had a static IP already to facilitate this setup). I have not yet had a need to try this out, so I won’t be able to discuss this particular topic further. However, the router has this facility, under the Management section, QoS subsection.

Other Notes

Proxies will not work with the router. If you attempt to connect your work laptop to your network and don’t remove the proxy setting, then you will not be able to make a connection.

The following is CD-R King’s technical support contact numbers, in case you need them. Support is available Monday to Sunday from 9:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. Manila time.